Guthrie, Okla. – August 5, 2026 (The Oklahoma Post)
It started with a domestic dispute call and a handful of unopened cigars.
In 2017, the Guthrie Sheriff’s Department responded to a domestic dispute at the home Kathleen Clark shared with the father of her youngest daughter. What responding Logan County deputy Long says he found, and what Clark says the report ultimately became, are two different things. Clark says the items in question were unopened cigarillos: the hollowed, re-rolled cigar wrappers sometimes used to roll a larger marijuana cigarette, commonly called a blunt, but unopened, unaltered, and, by Clark’s account, unused. By the time the report worked its way through the system, according to Clark, those unopened cigarillos had become marijuana paraphernalia, serious enough to trigger a Department of Human Services custody case that would take her daughters out of her home entirely.
What followed, per Clark’s terrifying account, was two long years that would set the pattern for everything after it. Her children were placed in foster care after being brought back across state lines from a stay with her sister in Texas over evidence that Oklahoma voters would render legally irrelevant less than a year into the case, when the state legalized the very substance DHS had removed her children over. Cannabis.
Clark, who now works in licensed cannabis legal compliance, represented herself at the initial custody hearing without an attorney. She says she got the assigned DHS caseworker to acknowledge, on the stand, that she had been a fit and protective parent. She says she rebutted the paraphernalia characterization outright. And she says the judge she recalls him as Judge Duel, now deceased, kept her children in state custody anyway, because of the domestic dispute itself, telling her she’d have them home within six months if she completed counseling, domestic violence courses, and drug testing. This is not the first time Judge Duel’s name has surfaced in connection with allegations of civil rights violations in his courtroom.
By Clark’s account, the state took two years to keep that promise. There is a version of this story that reads as farce cigars mistaken for contraband, contraband legalized within the year, two years lost regardless. There is another version, the one Clark lived, she is human, she is a mom, she was living her life well, where a bureaucracy moved at its own pace regardless of what the underlying facts of a government criminal case could actually support. Both versions are, as far as this newsroom can currently document, true at the same time. It is, more or less, the shape the rest of this case would take. Formless. Intruding. Never-ending, as if OKDHS had found, in Judge Duel’s courtroom, a kind of cover that outlasted every fact working against it, until his death closed that chapter whether the agency was ready for it to close or not.
Her daughters came home by the end of 2019. Nothing about what came next was any faster.
What Clark Alleges
Clark’s child support case; Dist. Court No. FD-2014-188, OAH No. 2014-08629, FGN 000787722001, a string of digits she can now presumably recite faster than her own social security number had been open since 2014, opened alongside a Medicaid application for her children with Jalan John Helsel. Court records show exactly one modification prior to 2025: Helsel’s July 2016 request to lower support back to minimum wage, granted, according to Clark, with a promptness the rest of the case would never again achieve. The court wanted money from her regardless: regardless of whether she’d gotten her children back, regardless of whether her daughter was dying of cancer. They wanted money, and they wanted it now. What the record does not show, with anywhere near the same consistency, is the state pursuing the fathers with that same urgency.
Clark says she filed modification requests roughly twice a year after that. Nine of them. None reflected in her case file, she says, until she did what a state agency with a nine-figure budget apparently could not: she went digging through her own inbox, found the old email receipts, and handed the agency proof of its own inaction. CSS added the missing requests to her file in April 2026. One imagines the file had grown so thin by then that adding ten years of paperwork to it must have felt, for whoever pulled it, like discovering a second floor in a house they’d lived in for a decade.
Clark’s July 21, 2026 formal grievance to OKDHS addressed to central region administrator Ann E. Murray and the agency’s Office of Inspector General alleges that original court filings were deleted or mischaracterized on the Oklahoma State Courts Network to make it appear her July 2025 request was the first CSS had received in years. She cites 45 CFR §§ 302.2 and 303.2, the federal recordkeeping mandates for Title IV-D agencies, and the Oklahoma Open Records Act, with the confidence of someone who has spent a great deal of a very hard year reading regulations she should never have needed to learn. A separate June 2026 escalation cites 45 CFR § 303.8(b), which Clark’s filing describes as requiring state Title IV-D agencies to complete a modification review within 180 calendar days of request a deadline she alleges was missed not by weeks, not by months, but by years, plural, with room to spare.
Clark points to a detail she considers telling: she says that within a week of filing federal complaints against the Guthrie CSS office, her prior access to open records on the case changed.
Izzy’s Diagnosis
In 2022, three years after her daughters had come home, Clark’s youngest Izzy, now 10 was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, according to Clark, beginning roughly two and a half years of chemotherapy: port surgery, infusions every few days, and the kind of schedule that does not leave room for a second job, let alone a third.
By Clark’s account and CSS’s own admission, this is precisely the window during which the modification review CSS had already found “warranted,” in March 2023, sat untouched. No hearing occurred for two years. The file was, in Murray’s word, “misplaced.” Clark says this is the single stretch of the entire decade where a functioning modification would have mattered most, financially, to her household and it is the stretch the agency’s own record shows went the longest without action.
Treatment outcomes for pediatric ALL have improved substantially in recent decades. According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year survival rate for children with ALL is now roughly 90 percent, up from closer to 60 percent several decades ago, a genuine medical success story. But the statistic describes a population outcome, not a household’s day-to-day reality. Treatment means a schedule of continuous medical management, infusion appointments, school coordination, immune monitoring, that leaves little room for standard employment, let alone for navigating a stagnant state bureaucracy at the same time. For a parent managing that alone, without a functioning modification or reliable support from either father, the toll compounds rather than resolves.
Clark has described, in conversations with this newsroom, two private ways she says she got through the hardest stretches of the past decade: her faith, and her own use of cannabis to manage anxiety during the years her daughters were in state custody.
The detail carries a genuine irony worth telling carefully: the substance Clark says she leaned on privately to cope with losing her children is the same substance state authorities cited, in mischaracterized form, as the reason for taking them. Oklahoma voters legalized that substance less than a year into the case that used it against her. Whether that irony belongs in the story as Clark’s own reflection, attributed directly to her, is her call to make.
What federal law says. Federal law requires state Title IV-D agencies to enforce and collect support and sets firm limits on retroactive modification, but it does not require the custodial parent’s own child support agency to expedite processing, waive obligations, or offer emergency relief simply because a child has been diagnosed with a serious illness. Once a support payment becomes due and unpaid, it hardens into a final judgment under the Bradley Amendment (42 U.S.C. § 666(a)(9); 45 CFR § 303.106) and cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven by any court, state or federal. Congress passed that rule to stop noncustodial parents from escaping arrears after the fact. Applied here, it cuts the other way: the same rule that prevents Helsel from erasing what he owed also prevented Clark from ever recovering, retroactively, what two lost years of an under-processed modification cost her. Modifications, once granted, run forward from the date of filing never backward.
What Oklahoma law says. State law, notably, does account for a situation like Izzy’s at least on paper. Oklahoma’s guidelines permit a court to deviate from the standard calculation for extraordinary medical expenses (43 O.S. § 118H), and a new medical condition requiring ongoing treatment is explicitly the kind of material change in circumstances that can justify a modification under 43 O.S. § 118I. Section 118H(E) goes a step further: when a parent is caring for a child with extraordinary medical needs not covered by insurance, the court is required to consider all resources available to meet those needs “including those available from public agencies.” The statute anticipated exactly this scenario and built in a mechanism for a court to weigh what help was, or wasn’t, actually offered by the state.
What actually happened, on CSS’s own telling, is that the mechanism the Legislature built for exactly this circumstance went unused not because the law lacked a path, Murray’s response makes clear, but because the caseworker assigned to Clark’s case left the agency before a hearing was held, and the file appears to have simply waited, unassigned, until Clark went and found it herself. The government’s collection machinery, meanwhile, continued operating on the other side of the ledger the entire time: pursuing Clark for support tied to her children’s care during the same years the law offered no functioning mechanism to help her carry the cost of keeping one of them alive.
What CSS Says, On the Un-Deleted Record
Enforcement actions in child support cases, wage levies, garnishments, flags on a noncustodial parent’s income don’t typically get switched off without a specific, accountable reason attached: there was documented child withholding, fraud upon the court, the parent pays what’s owed, the custodial parent formally asks CSS to stand down, or a court orders it.
In the this case, the February 4, 2026 update Clark received showed a wage levy in place and a federal flag reset specifically to obtain his employment information the normal machinery of enforcement, working as intended. On April 8, 2026, that machinery stopped. The reason CSS gave, per the case record, was “anonymous email received.” No sender’s name. No copy of the message. No explanation of what it said or why it was treated as sufficient grounds to call off collection. This account notably does not address that cancellation at all, it remains unresolved and undocumented on CSS’s end.
That is the entire basis of Clark’s concern: an unverifiable, unattributed email, one CSS has never produced, despite her repeated requests appears to have been enough, on its own, to stop the state from collecting support Clark’s daughter was owed. Whether that email came from the father himself, from someone else entirely, or reflects a misfiled internal note that got mislabeled in CSS’s system is unknown, because CSS has not said. Clark’s July 21, 2026 grievance asks directly for a copy of the email and its origin, along with an internal investigation into how an anonymous message was allowed to halt enforcement action.
Clark’s own theory of the cancellation is direct: she believes it, and the later disappearance of the November 2025 filing from OSCN, both served the same purpose keeping CSS’s federal performance metrics clean enough to qualify for maximum Title IV-D incentive funding, regardless of whether the underlying casework had actually been done. That is her interpretation of why it happened, not a documented finding; what is documented is that the cancellation occurred, on the strength of a message nobody has been able to identify.
There is no action we can take to modify those past child support obligations.” In plainer terms: even if every single one of Clark’s earlier filings was mishandled exactly as she describes misfiled, misplaced, or simply never opened; Oklahoma law would not have let CSS retroactively fix any of it anyway. It is the rare defense that concedes almost everything and apologizes for none of it.
Murray also states CSS has since audited the Guthrie office’s modification-review process, case allocation, and staff training, and discussed with attorneys and the office manager how Clark’s case specifically could have been handled better. Whether “discussed” constitutes an action verb in this context is, like most things in this story, a matter of interpretation.
Clark connects this to a second, related theory: that the November 12, 2025 filing disappeared from OSCN’s public docket specifically to obscure the fact that CSS had not documented the July 2025 request when it was actually received, allowing the agency’s email system which Clark’s own June 2026 grievance says auto-deletes correspondence after 90 days without creating a record of contact to erase the gap before anyone outside the agency could see it. In her account, the effect is the same in both instances: whatever version of events keeps CSS’s federal compliance metrics clean survives, and whatever version would show a missed deadline does not.
Not an Isolated Case
Clark’s 2017 custody case did not happen in a vacuum, and cannabis-related family separations are neither rare nor confined to Oklahoma. A 2022 report from the advocacy group Movement for Family Power, titled “How the Foster System Has Become Ground Zero for the U.S. Drug War”, documented cases nationally in which parents faced separation from their children over marijuana use or positive test results, including a Bronx mother pressured into residential treatment after a hospital reported her newborn’s positive cannabis screen to child welfare authorities. In Los Angeles County, a mother identified in later reporting only as “Dale” had her children removed by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services in 2017 after a mental health crisis and a positive marijuana test, a removal her advocates have since pointed to publicly as evidence of overreach in how “general neglect” is applied.
The broader numbers support the pattern without proving any individual case: caretaker drug use is consistently cited as one of the leading reasons children enter foster care nationally, and researchers have tracked a rise in drug-related removals over the past two decades, including in states where marijuana use is no longer criminal. Whether Clark’s case reflects that national pattern or a more localized failure specific to Payne and Logan counties is a question this story cannot yet answer with certainty.
The About Face Question
There is a formal mechanism in Payne County that, on paper, exists for situations resembling Clark’s: the About Face Women’s Offender Program, created under outgoing District Attorney Laura Austin Thomas and described by her office as her signature achievement in more than four decades of public service, an alternative to prosecution and, implicitly, to the kind of custody-first response Clark says she encountered.
Whether that program functions as intended is an open question. This outlet’s own prior reporting on a separate Payne County case found the program used in a way that drew scrutiny over unequal treatment, not evidence that it goes unused. Clark says she was never offered a path through About Face or any comparable diversion option in 2017; whether she was eligible, whether it existed for her case type at the time, and whether other parents in the county have been denied access to it while facing custody consequences instead remain open questions this newsroom has not yet independently confirmed.
Thomas retired effective April 30, 2026. Jeremiah Gregory, a former Payne County assistant district attorney, was sworn in as her successor on July 31, 2026, taking office amid an active push by a Payne County citizens’ group for a grand jury investigation into the outgoing administration, a push Gregory has publicly said he supports. Whether Gregory’s office changes how family-preservation options are used in cases like Clark’s, rather than defaulting to custody removal, is a question this newsroom intends to put to him directly.
Two Crises, One Decade
Laid end to end, the record shows two separate emergencies, five years apart, both run through the same set of state offices.
The first came in 2017: a domestic dispute call, unopened cigarillos characterized as marijuana paraphernalia, and a DHS custody case that pulled Clark’s daughters into foster care before returning them home roughly two years later than the presiding judge had told her to expect.
The second came in 2022: her youngest daughter’s leukemia diagnosis, arriving three years after the girls had already come home, landing squarely inside the same modification fight that had, by then, been quietly stalled for the better part of a decade.
These are not the same event, and nothing in the record reviewed for this story indicates DHS threatened custody during Izzy’s cancer treatment. But they are not unrelated, either. They are the same mother, the same handful of state offices, and the same pattern repeating on a longer clock: an initial state action that outran what the underlying facts could support, followed by years in which the system’s course-correction arrived late enough to cost her something it could never give back two years of her daughters’ childhoods in the first instance, two years of a modification that could have eased the hardest stretch of her daughter’s chemotherapy in the second.
Clark states she is not withholding either of her daughters from their fathers and has not sought to limit their access to the children.
How Her Children Are Doing Now
Clark’s daughters are in different places, five years and one modification fight apart. Her oldest, Laylah, still carries what Clark describes as the emotional weight of an absent father a man Clark says hasn’t seen her since 2014, and whose sons from another relationship, Clark says, he fought hard in court to see before abandoning that case as well. “It left her trapped in a painful loop, wondering why her father chooses to favor his other children while completely discarding her,” Clark said. She says Laylah is working through it “transforming her pain into power,” in Clark’s words, and building a sense of self-worth independent of her father’s absence.
Izzy, now in remission, still deals with daily side effects from chemotherapy but remains, in her mother’s description, joyful and outgoing. Unlike her older sister’s situation, Clark says Izzy has maintained a good relationship with her own father throughout the years-long child support fight a distinction Clark says she’s grateful her daughter didn’t have to lose along with everything else.
In Her Own Words: What Clark Wants Changed
Asked what she believes needs to happen next, Clark did not hedge. She points to CSS’s own stated mission “to promote healthy families… while encouraging self-sufficiency and strengthening relationships” and argues the agency’s practices, as she’s experienced them, run counter to it. She’s called for independent, third-party audits of CSS’s case management and use of federal funding; documentation of what she describes as a pattern of miscommunication and case neglect; tying federal incentive funding to verified outcomes rather than compliance metrics; and legislative reform that would remove agency immunity in cases of proven bad faith or gross negligence.
Her advice to other Oklahoma parents in a similar position is more procedural: read the federal regulations governing your own case, she says, and don’t accept an agency’s word that a request was never received. “Contact the customer hotline to confirm every modification request and all correspondence has been officially logged,” Clark said. “If they lack documentation, use your email receipts to force compliance with federal record-keeping standards.” It took her twelve years to learn that lesson. She’d like other families to learn it faster.
Asked how the experience affected her, Clark described a specific and compounding sense of institutional dismissal being treated, in her words, as “invisible” and “undeserving of justice” by an agency she says protects its own at every level. She points to CSS attorney David Hammons citing high caseload volume to explain the agency’s delays, and to Judge Dawson’s characterization of the modification process as “discretionary” rather than mandatory, as evidence the pattern runs from caseworker to courtroom.
Why This Matters
Strip away the case numbers and the statutory citations, and what’s left is a plainer question: what does a state actually prioritize when a family is falling apart?
Oklahoma had tools built for exactly Clark’s situation. A diversion program exists in Payne County specifically to keep families intact instead of defaulting to removal. State law explicitly instructs courts to weigh public assistance when a child has extraordinary medical needs. None of it, on the record collected for this story, reached Clark when it mattered not in 2017, when cigars became grounds to take her children, and not in 2022 and 2023, when her daughter’s leukemia treatment coincided with two years of a modification request the state’s own administrator later called “misplaced.”
What did keep functioning, without interruption, in both instances: the state’s ability to pursue money. CSS continued pursuing Clark for support during the years DHS held her children in its own custody. It continued operating an enforcement and collection apparatus tied to federal performance incentives throughout the exact period it failed, by its own account, to process the modification that could have eased her daughter’s cancer treatment. And when questions were raised about where the paperwork went, the record shows documents disappearing rather than answers arriving.
This newsroom is not in a position to prove, and does not assert, that any single person in this chain acted with deliberate intent to harm this family. What the documented record does show is a pattern: a state apparatus that reliably found the capacity to collect, and reliably failed to find the capacity to help even when the law and the state’s own programs said it should. Whether that pattern reflects individual negligence, institutional priorities shaped by federal funding incentives, or something closer to what Clark alleges outright, is a question Oklahoma lawmakers, not this newsroom alone, now have the documentation to answer. A system that keeps its collection machinery running smoothly while its family-preservation machinery sits idle is a system that has already told you, through its own conduct, what it actually values. Money, Control, and Power.
Writing By: Robbie Robertson | Editing by Robbie Robertson
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Sources
Case documents and correspondence: CSS case timeline and grievance filings provided by Kathleen Clark, FGN 000787722001; November 12, 2025 Motion to Modify Child Support, Dist. Court No. FD-2014-188, OAH No. 2014-08629; July 21, 2026 Formal Administrative Grievance and Ann Murray’s response of the same date; CSS Inquiry Team correspondence, July 2026; Antoinette Knight correspondence, April 27, 2026; Kathleen Clark correspondence with OCSS.Contact.Guthrie, April–May 2026; recorded interview with Kathleen Clark.
Crowdsourced Brady-list-style site alleging Gregory misconduct: https://giglio-bradylist.com/prosecutor-misconduct-no-1670984862-416187301 — this is a user-submitted complaint aggregator, not a vetted record.
National context:
- Movement for Family Power, “How the Foster System Has Become Ground Zero for the U.S. Drug War”, via Imprint News
- California Health Report, “Punishing Families Part 2: L.A. County Data Reveals Child Removal Hotspots” (2023)
- CAFO, “US Foster Care Statistics 2026”
Payne County District Attorney transition:
- Guthrie News Page, “Jeremiah Gregory sworn in as district attorney for Logan and Payne counties” (July 31, 2026)
- News9, “Payne County group seeks grand jury investigation into former district attorney” (June 2026)
- 1600 KUSH, “District Attorney Laura Austin Thomas Announces Retirement After 42 Years of Public Service” (April 2026)
- The Oklahoma Post, “Justice Delayed In A Payne County Case Raises Questions About Equal Treatment Under Law” (October 2025)
Federal and state law cited:
- 45 CFR §§ 302.2, 303.2, 303.8(b) (Title IV-D recordkeeping and processing requirements)
- 42 U.S.C. § 666(a)(9); 45 CFR § 303.106 (Bradley Amendment)
- 43 O.S. §§ 118H, 118I (Oklahoma child support guideline deviations and modification standards)
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